Graph Vision

How a protean mathematical object, the graph, ushered in new images, tools, and infrastructures for design and catalyzed a digital future for architecture.

In Graph Vision, Theodora Vardouli offers a fresh history of architecture’s early entanglements with modern mathematics and digital computing by focusing on a hidden protagonist: the graph. Fueled by iconoclastic sentiments and skepticism of geometric depiction, architects, she explains, turned to the skeletal underpinnings of their work, and with it the graph, as a site of representation, operation, and political possibility. Taking the reader on an enthralling journey through a polyvalent mathematical entity, Vardouli combines close readings of graphs’ architectural manifestations as images, tools, and infrastructures for design with original archival work on research centers that spearheaded mathematical and computational approaches to architecture.

Structured thematically, Graph Vision weaves together archival findings on influential research groups such as the Land Use Built Form Studies Center at the University of Cambridge, the Center for Environmental Structure at Berkeley, the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, as well as important figures who led, or worked in proximity to, these groups, including Lionel March, Christopher Alexander, and Yona Friedman. Together, this material chronicles the emergence of both a new way of seeing and a new prospect for the discipline that prefigured its digital future—of a “graph vision.” Vardouli argues that this vision was one of vacillation toward visual appearance. Digital approaches to architecture, she ultimately reveals, were founded on a profound ambivalence toward the visual realm endemic to mid-twentieth century architectural and mathematical modernisms.1 Graphs
2 Images
Peril
Forms
Textbooks
Frameworks
Isomorphisms
3 Tools
Ends
Data
Layouts
Patterns
Generativities
4 Infrastructures
Control
Chance
Choice
Possibility
Combinatorics
5 Skeletons
Ghosts
Flesh
Boxes
Closets
Acknowledgements
Notes
Illustrations
Index“Vardouli has done an excellent job. She is fully in command of all the mathematics and computation and has ploughed her way through many dusty, indigestible documents to produce her lucid and attractive account.”
—Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science“In this brilliant book, Theodora Vardouli explores the multiple ways in which graphs have been haunting architecture from late modernism to the rise of the digital. Weaving together the visual, the instrumental, and the infrastructural dimensions, she offers new insights into the rise of the computational in design.”
—Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design; author of The Materiality of Architecture
 
“Much ink has been spilled on formalism and functionalism in architectural modernity. Graph Vision brilliantly recasts these debates in an entirely new mold by making the structuralist impulse of graph-making a primary protagonist of twentieth-century architectural discourses. Stripping architecture temporarily of its flesh, these graphs made relations (rather than forms or functions) into objects of analysis and manipulation for postwar architects. Vardouli’s deeply researched, beautifully written, and stunningly original book will change how historians and practitioners alike will understand the history of that thing we now call ‘digital architecture.’”
—Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Associate Professor, Columbia UniversityTheodora Vardouli is Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. She is coauthor and coeditor of Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design and coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground.